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hence be infinitely replaceable by, another of the same species. A robust legacy of
Darwinism is its insistence on this gradual organic seriation: notwithstanding minor
behavioural or morphological variations, the individual embodies the archetype
(Wilkins, 2009: 227-234). Hence the biological fetishisation of type specimens.
Indeed, the prevailing ontology of the arthropod is the prototypical specimen, an
enduring object persisting from the remote past into the far future. A reverse
transformation is effected in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , in which the
Tralfamadorians - extraterrestrials whose vision spans both time and space - see
humans as quasi-arthropods, 'as great millipedes - “with babies' legs at one end
and old people's legs at the other”' (Vonnegut, 1973: 62).
But how do we span the light years from Tralfamador to Tom Griffiths' time
bomb?
I have gestured to 'assemblages', and it is to this concept that I now return to
draw together the foregoing strands. There are two distinct genealogies of
'assemblage' that have recently begun to intersect in intriguing ways. The newer
iteration, stemming from continental philosophy, has proved productive - if
sometimes problematic - in crafting posthumanist accounts of animals or ecologies
(for instance, Franklin, 2008). Extending poststructuralist attempts to decentre
the subject, and with a sometimes under-acknowledged debt to Latour, such
explorations incorporate the 'assemblages' narrated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari.
It is no coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari's constructs of anti-teleological
multiplicity draw explicitly upon biological models: metastasis and becoming-
animal. In eschewing Modernist tenets of autonomy, rationality and dominion,
Deleuze and Guattari instead narrate assemblages as sites of productive intersection
between perpetually unstable entities. Each entity - human or otherwise -
simultaneously embodies both its archetypal iteration and its endless permutations:
the wolf is becoming the pack, and vice versa.
Governed by no internal logos, or telos, these multiplicities are defined by their
relations of exteriority - the points where they intersect with other multiplicities,
contaminating them to spawn new assemblages: the wolf-man, the rhizome
(Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 256-287). Each assemblage thus reifies a historical
singularity: its configurations are unrepeatable, and its ontologies unpredictable.
There is, however, an earlier usage of 'assemblage' that has - with some notable
exceptions - been largely overlooked. The archaeological concept of assemblage is a
fundamental disciplinary heuristic, ascribing meaning to a collection of artefacts.
In archaeology, an 'assemblage' can denote an accumulation of disparate objects
associated through contextual deposition or spatial relationships, embodying the
material remains of a specific human culture. However, 'assemblage' also encompasses
a find of similar objects within a bounded geographical site, representing variations
on a type of artefact, or an industry. Within either definition, an archaeological
assemblage is ultimately read as a single analytical unit.
What recent archaeological theorists have questioned is whether such assem-
blages are ever static. This is particularly so for scholars exploring the field known
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